Place Branding

Cities increasingly brand themselves as an attractive place for tourists, investors, business and workforce. Yet, most place branding efforts do not take the diversity of their stakeholders and the variety of place perceptions into account. Our study, however, reveals significant discrepancies between internal and external stakeholders’ mental representations of a place brand, using the city of Hamburg as an example. We therefore argue that place brand management needs to align its brand communication with stakeholders’ interests, using an integrated approach to developing city-specific strategies for building target group-specific place brand architecture.